New Features: Linking, Sorting, Paging

November 19, 2010

Jane Wells

Oh my!

It’s that time of year again, when the folks over at WordPress.org start putting the finishing touches on the next version of WordPress (in this case, version 3.1), and the lucky users of WordPress.com are automatically included in the beta testing, giving you all access to new features about a month before they are officially released. This is awesome, because you get early access, and your feedback can help us make even more improvements. I’m personally pretty excited about the new features you’ll be seeing around here starting later tonight, as they are additions I’ve been wanting for a long time. Here are the new things you can expect to see the next time you’re in your dashboard:

Easier Internal Linking

Yay. Finally. Literally. Seriously. What?! I know, right? 🙂

You’re writing a post (or a page) in WordPress. You mention something you’ve written about before, and think to yourself, “I’m going to link to that last post!” What do you do? You might open a new tab and search for the older content in your dashboard’s list of posts, or you might go to your live blog and find it. Either way, you have to find that content and get the URL, so that when you click on the link button in the post editor, you’ll have it ready. Right? What’s that, 5-8 steps, depending on which way you do it? No more!

Existing posts and pages can be found and linked to using dynamic search.

With our sexy new internal linking feature, you can now enter any URL to create a link just like you used to, OR you can search your existing posts and pages right there in the link popup. A combination of pre-loading, autocomplete, and some ajaxy goodness make the new link creation tool a joy to use (and man, that popup is so much faster!). We hope this addition spurs you to make more connections between pieces of content on your site, which will make it easier for your visitors to find more related content from you. One more time, all together now: Yay! (Right?)

Column Sorting

When you’re in your dashboard and you click to the Posts section (or Pages, Media, any screen with one of those listing tables), do you ever wish you could click a column header to change the display, like to sort things by date, alphabetically, by author, or other criteria? I know I wish for it all the time. And now we have it! This feature is a product of a successful Google Summer of Code student project, proof that the program is a great way to get involved with WordPress development. The little arrow next to the column heading (in my example screenshot, the Date column) shows you which column is determining the sort order, and if it’s ascending or descending. Just click on the column header to sort by that column, or to reverse the order.

Better Pagination

If you have a lot of content, you may have run into a mildly annoying experience at some point when paging through screens in the dashboard that list your posts, media files, etc. Clicking forward and back is easy enough, as is skipping to the first or last couple of screens, but what about the middle? Say you had 23 screens worth of post listings, you’re on screen #6, and based on the dates, you think the one you’re looking for might be around page 15 or so. You would have had to click several times to advance a few screens at a time until you reached the screen you wanted. No more! With our new pagination style, those quick forward/back and first/last links are still there, but now you can jump right to any screen by just changing the editable number shown in the pagination area (and hitting enter). Sweet!

Ajax Search Results

Reviewing search results will be faster and no longer require screen refreshes in the dashboard, thanks to the addition of ajax to the search results screen. Go Speed Racer!

Revised Blue Color Scheme

In the personal options in your profile, you have a choice between gray and blue dashboard color schemes (the default is gray). We updated the gray color scheme a while back, but didn’t update the blue one at the same time. (Remember when we moved from the dark header to the lighter header? Good times.) The new blue color scheme is lighter, cleaner, and based on the same shadings as the gray color scheme but with a blue hue so that your focus can remain firmly on your content creation, without distraction. If you’ve never tried the blue color scheme, now would be a great time to give it a whirl and see how you like it! Are there other colors you’d like to have as options? Let us know in the comments!

Improved IE9 Support

If you’ve had any trouble using drag and drop features in the dashboard or have had any problems with the Visual editor on the post creation screen when using Internet Explorer 9, sorry! Improvements have been made to make these features work smoothly in the latest Microsoft browser.

Good stuff, yeah? Things to bear in mind: these are new features, and though they’ve been worked on and tested for some time, you may find a bug we missed. If one of these features gives you any trouble, please let us know. You can leave a comment on this post within the next two weeks, talk about it in the forums, or contact support through the usual channels.

I hope you enjoy these additions as much as we enjoyed making them for you. Happy blogging!

Update: November 20, 2010 11:30am

Thanks to your reports we’ve been able to find and fix a couple of bugs that we didn’t encounter in our own advance testing.

We fixed a conflict with the CSS plugin wordpress.com uses (the incompatibility did weird things to content in the editor), so reported problems like content being all underlined or bolded unexpectedly should no longer be happening.

We fixed an issue with IE8 for internal linking. We are still working on issues with IE7. (But seriously, using outdated browsers is generally not a good idea. Update your browser!)

If you are still encountering issues with the new features, when you leave a comment or contact support, please state what operating system and browser you are using so we can troubleshoot faster. Examples: “I’m using Firefox 3.9 on Mac OSX 10.5.” “I’m using Google Chrome on Windows 7.”

Thanks!

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That’s been there since the end of 2008. It’s just a convenience so that everything related to a post can be found in one place. Hopefully you find it useful, but if not, you can hide the comments from that screen by unchecking the Comments box in the Screen Options tab.

Better Pagination is one thing i like bcs when ever i want to add a image it takes hell lot of time bcs i have more than 300+ images sometime i need to add image in between 100 so it takes a lot of time clicking next and all yeah we can use keyword and search but this feature is cool thank u wordress keep rocking

Ooooooooooooh!!!!! I know I will use the internal linking feature. That will save so many steps and therefore lots of time, which will be great when I’m in a locale that has slow Internet service. Same with the pagination feature. Thank you!

There were a couple of temporary, unexpected bugs at first, but they were ironed out as quickly as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience! If you are still having issues with your images, please contact support for help.

I write my material in word documents, often with pictorial included, and when ‘copy & paste’ or ‘drag’ the document into the WordPress blog the pictures ALWAYS disappear … the ‘copy and paste’ function has also started to stop leaving only the ‘drag’ option open …
These are issues I hear complaints about from other users too and should be addressed – I and others have raised it with you before but to no avail yet …
Wolfgang

Hi Wolfgang! Sorry to hear you’re having trouble. Your comment doesn’t sound related to any of the new features mentioned in this post, it sounds like a problem associated with trying to put Microsoft Word content into WordPress. To better understand why this is, please read our support article about pasting from Microsoft Word.

Easier Internal Linking – this is really exciting to me because I link to older posts all the time. You have saved me time and made it more likely that I will bother to post every link to older posts. Thanks so much for all you do to make WordPress the absolute best blogging site on the internet!!

its bugging 😦 i lost whole content in my home page today when i went to edit it and even the restore feature is not working for me 😦 i think its bcs of this new feature damn please correct it it takes 1 hour for me to reconstruct everything on my homepage

Unfortunately, there were a couple of temporary, unexpected bugs at first, but they were ironed out as quickly as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience! If you are still having issues with your site, please contact support for help.

Holy COW!!! That first new feature is gonna make my life so much better! Wow! I’ve got over 1000 posts on one blog and hundreds of posts on other blogs and I’m often trying to link old content to new! Thanks so much!

If you can provide better support for Simplified Chinese, I think I will be more convenient to use the various features of WordPress, whether new or old.
After all, even write a short text, I still need Google’s translation function.

Translations of WordPress, like WordPress itself, are completed as open source community projects, and if you have the ability to contribute and improved the Simplified Chinese translations, I’m sure the translating team would appreciate the help.

I think the new improvements sound great. I especially think the “easier internal linking” and “column sorting” sound awesome. Thanks for the great work! I think WordPress is ONE place in the world where when you say “We’ve improved this.” – it is actually true. 😉

So far its a disaster, the new link options links (and underlines) the entire text of a post not just the selected text Formatting like bolding, and justification etc doesn’t stick when you post. Hope teh bugs get sorted out soon

That particular bug totally freaked me out when it happend right after the launch (I noticed it on this post, in fact, when I went back to edit a typo), but it was fixed within about 10 minutes of it being discovered, so hopefully you weren’t inconvenienced for too long.

The admin bar is occasionally updated based on the usage patterns of the wordpress.com community. I think the Add to Blogroll function was not getting used much, especially since subscriptions were added to the admin bar.

What is wrong with WordPress tonight? I just spent 4 hours, literally, trying to make a new post and update an old post, but no features are working! Couldn’t separate paragraphs. Couldn’t embolden fonts or color change. Whether I tried in HTML or the regular way. Whether I tried to update an old post or start a new one from scratch. It was a good waste of a night 😦

I’m so sorry you had such a bad experience! It’s weird that it was acting up for 4 hours, though, since we fixed that formatting bug about 10-15 minutes after discovering it when we launched the new features. We did have a couple of unexpected bugs, specifically in Internet Explorer browsers, that took longer to fix, so if it was one of those causing you trouble, again, I apologize.

I really love the internal linking ability because I’m always going “oh yeah, I want to include a previous post” and then having to go through a lot of trouble finding the old post. Thanks so much for the new features!

I doubt I’ll use the the new URL thing because (1) I don’t memorize URL addresses, (2) The search thing pulls up so many choices that the old method will be just as efficient for me. I never use the previous or next feature anyway. I pretty much know what I posted when because much of what I do is event/date sensitive.

Pagination is promising. Others make it work well.

I could care less about color scheme and I don’t use IE9 but thank you for your continued efforts.

Love the Easier Internal Linking feature but I am intrigued as to why you refer to it as “Sexy” ?
“With our sexy new internal linking feature, you can now enter any URL to create a link just like you used to…”

Nice new features! I love the internal linking! I’ve been missing that…

I’m still waiting for the feature that lets you try new themes and customize them before they’re shown on the actual blog. Like a “Publish”-button for the new theme when you’re satisfied. I hate the way my blog looks when I’m in the middle of changing themes and is customizing it and trying colors and such – it looks like a constructionsite and it ain’t pretty! I would rather like my visitors to see the old theme until the new theme is complete and ready for the world! =D

This is probably the best update for wordpress ever!!!
I wish I had known wordpress earlier.. I used to use a different site and had the worst experience ever.
I really love wordpress! You guys should add a feature of liking a comment!